Production Design
German apparently disavowed this, his first film, because of his co-director Grigori Aranov's more classical approach (and his kowtowing to Soviet authority); too bad, because it's something of a knockout. A brilliant, gripping portrait of the era of "Red Terror" during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, The Seventh Companion offers a superlative character study in General Adamov (Andrei Popov), a law professor in the tsarist army, who is incarcerated by the Bolshevik secret police along with many other members of the bourgeoisie. Finally released into the new world of the Soviet Union, the resigned officer finds that he has lost everything from his old life except a mantel clock that he carries through the night from place to place, until he ends up, like Rossellini's inmate seeking readmission to prison in Dovè la liberta?, back where he started.
Production Design
Transatlantic flight 713 is in trouble because the pilot and crew are poisoned while flying above the ocean. Now the passengers have to take control to save their lives.
Art Direction
Screen adaptation of Tchaikovsky's opera based on the Aleksandr Pushkin short story of the same name.
Art Direction
A strange film as beautifully jumbled as the political environment out of which it sprang, like a handsome weed, "Son of Mongolia" is a travelogue of unique and authentic richness, an amusing Far Eastern horse opera of picaresque character, and a scientifically valuable anthropological document in which the Soviet film industry may well take pride. Objective and modern, yet permeated with a fresh folk quality that goes back to the reckless and lovely Tartary of Genghis Khan, it rises above all its inescapable Soviet-isms into a new frontier region of plains, mountains, tents and herds, a world still appreciably beyond the range of Western cameras.
